the cost of desire
by
Douglas Messerli
Alain
Guiraudie (writer and director) L'Inconnu du lac (The Stranger by the
Lake) / 2013
What
is the cost of sexual desire? I once went home with a beautiful boy from a Greenwich
Village bar, who asked if he might he piss all over me. I insisted that I was
not interested. But he still managed to infect me with Gonorrhea (not my first
time, sad to say).
French director Alain Guiradie explores
far deeper issues in his 2013 film L'Inconnu de lac (The Stranger by the Lake) where a desirous young man, attending a gay nude
beach whose nearby woods lures men, old and young, to have sex, consensual and
voyeuristic both. Basically an innocent, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), as I
thought myself to be, attends these beach outings, calmly sitting next to the
mostly passive rotund and unattractive Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao), who
seemingly has no interest in the cruising activities of the younger people
around him, yet is gently attentive to his conversations with the handsome
young Franck. Occasionally, they even take a quiet dinner together.
Henri, evidently suffering the pains of a long-ago death of his wife, seeks out the lakeside gay retreat as a simply place of last resort, or, one might describe it as search for a world far away “from the other side,” a part of the beach sought out by heterosexual nudists who want nothing to do with the gay boys and older men on the other side.
In fact, there is something beautiful
about the relationship between Franck and Henri, as the two heat up on the
beach in gentle conversation, while others sleep naked like whales in the sand
or retreat into the woods. I’ve been there. It is a world of total excitement
and hesitant but equally excited observation. It is a standard world of the gay
gaze and sexual engagement, delightful and despicable in equal dollops.
Into this world the innocent Franck
enters, not a regular in this seemingly perverse world, but almost falling in
love at first sight with a mustachioed young man—which some critics have
pointed out is almost the model of 1970s porno films—whom he observes drowning
his sexual companion in the lake.
The saddest thing about this rather
complex film is that Franck does not report the act, and, in fact himself falls
in love with the murderer. Yes, this is a story about AIDS, in which the most
knowing of gays often could not resist their own infatuations with those who
they surely knew might have been causing their deaths; but the film is also Eros
and Thanatos, the
gentle, sometimes even desired, movement of love into death.
Franck, fixated on the murderer, Michel (Christophe
Paou), is, himself, allowing a knowingly, possible murderous repeat of the past.
Somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock’s outsider woman in Strangers on a Train,
who even invites her murderer into her “Tunnel of Love,” realizing that it is a
dangerous adventure into which she has embarked. Guiradie’s film even more
closely reminds one of Hitchcock’s Rope wherein two gay men gratuitously
kill an innocent straight man just for the thrill of it.
Michel, as the detective questioning the locals suggests, is probably more homophobic than simply interested in the thrill of the kill. Despite the graphic sex the director reveals is the tie between the two of them, even Michel suggests early on in their relationship that there will be a day in which Franck will lose interest, a day, we can only suspect, will end in his death. And there is an undertone here of a mad jealousy behind Michel’s gaze.
Yet the fact that he will not invite Franck home and even provide him with a description of how he is employed that there is something darker than even jealousy about his actions. Is he married to a woman with a family, hating himself for his sexual “indiscretions?” Does he perhaps live with a mother or father to whom it is impossible to reveal his activities?
I’d argue that one of the major failures
of Guiradie’s film is that, in fact, we know virtually nothing about the daily
inhabitants of this lakeside beach. How do they all financially support their
daily treks to the lake and woods surrounding? Indeed, the director presents
them only as mostly sexual predators. Only the quiet Henri and the kind Franck
seem to have depth of personality.
Yet Franck, knowing the truth, refuses to
reveal it, living a lie that is as deep as the murderous intentions of his
temporary lover; and Henri, suspecting the truth is murdered, presumably by
Michel, for his knowledge. Michel cannot but perceive that Henri’s friend must also
know what has happened.
For the second time, the now
not-so-innocent Franck realizes the horrors of the man he has chosen for a
lover. And he temporarily hides within the woods to keep himself safe. Surely
he cannot believe Michel’s statements as he searches for Franck: “I won’t hurt
you. I need you. We can spend the night together.”
Yet
once Michel seems to have left have left and darkness has descended upon this
false paradise, Franck exits his hideaway in the reeds to call out Michel’s
name, a first quietly, then louder, and finally in a kind desperate shout, as
if not only he has lost his love, but is totally prepared to face the
consequences of being reunited.
The film ends in near total darkness
draping over the vaguely perceived shoulders of Franck. We know the ending
without Guiradie having even to tell us. The allure of darkness is what that
woods is all about.
Los
Angeles, December 17, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December 2019).
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